


A Bell That Rings

by EllieMurasaki



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: spn_bitesized, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-20
Updated: 2010-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:38:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMurasaki/pseuds/EllieMurasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John couldn't always interact civilly with Mary, but he always wanted her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Bell That Rings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [later_tuesday](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=later_tuesday).



> Title from Pink Floyd's "Bike" (if you think it could look good, then I guess it should).

_I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like_

When Johnny's family moved from Gary, Indiana to Lawrence, Kansas, Johnny was fourteen. The prettiest girl in his class was Mary Campbell, but she rubbed him the wrong way. Among other things, too flirty.

That didn't keep Johnny from punching her then-boyfriend when he smirkingly suggested to Johnny that all it took to get a hand up Mary's shirt was a smile and a milkshake.

_Here a man, there a man, lots of gingerbread men_

John was sixteen the first time Mary overheard one of her many ex-boyfriends say Mary was easy. She put the idiot in the hospital. John fell in love.

John turned seventeen before he worked up the nerve to ask Mary out. It wasn't till several months later, when he'd enlisted in the Marines and was getting three letters a week from her while he was at boot camp, that the nagging doubt about whether she was only with him to enjoy herself finally went away.

_There's a tear up the front, it's red and black_

John had a week between boot camp and shipping out. He and Mary spent most of it fucking. Most of the rest, John watched Mary draw runes on various parts of John's anatomy and pray in Latin: part blessing, part foreplay. John swore, if he came back from Vietnam alive and she still wanted him, he'd marry her.

That promise kept him alive. Kept him sane even as he killed a lot of people, watched a lot of good people die. Blood and horror and pain and death, and through it all there was the memory of his shining guardian angel.

When John got back, all he wanted was to pretend he'd never seen Vietnam. He meant to spend several months courting Mary all over again, but then her father lost his mind and killed her mother and Mary killed him and John had to help cover it up. Mary's sanity and freedom depended on it.

_I'll give you anything, everything if you want things_

The moment the Campbells' ashes were scattered, John and Mary drove to California and got married in the first town that'd let them. They spent a year in sight of the ocean, letting the salt water wash away the blood, and then came back. Mary wanted to raise her children in the same town where she'd grown up.

_I'd give it to you if I could_

The nagging doubt about whether Mary would have lived had John insisted they stay in California got stronger when John figured out that Mary's parents weren't the only suspicious deaths in the Lawrence area circa ten-years-and-six-months before she died.

_You're the kind of girl who fits in with my world_

That doubt didn't go away until sometime after John died. Some of Alastair's taunts rang false, but every time Alastair said the Winchester family curse, demons and hunting and all, had started with the Campbells hunting down Azazel, it had the ring of truth.

John wished she'd told him. He would have loved her anyway.


End file.
